Read the question again: "Should billionaires be allowed to exist?" Allowed by whom, exactly? Some committee gets to decide the maximum permissible success, and past that line your property is forfeit? That's the actual mechanism being proposed here, and it deserves to be stated plainly, because "tax the rich" sounds a lot friendlier than "the state will confiscate everything past a number we picked." I'm not a billionaire and will never be one. But a government powerful enough to decree that no citizen may hold more than X dollars is a government powerful enough to move X wherever it likes, and history suggests it won't stop at people richer than you. The same logic that caps wealth at a billion caps it at a million once the politics shift. If the problem is that the tax code is broken, fix the tax code. "You may not be this successful" is a different and darker idea than "you must pay your share."
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PoliticsOct 6, 2026
Should billionaires be allowed to exist?
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Discussion (2)
Nordhaus 2% figure is doing a lot of work in these comments. Capturing 2% of a trillion dollar surplus is still 20 billion dollars, which is an absurd reward by any human standard. Nobody is saying the innovator should get zero. We're saying the split can be renegotiated.
My grandfather fled a country that confiscated fortunes and I don't think half of you understand what that apparatus looks like up close. It's never just the billionaires. It never stops at the billionaires.